{"id":321,"date":"2010-11-09T05:55:29","date_gmt":"2010-11-09T09:55:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.hamiltonartist.com\/blog\/?p=321"},"modified":"2010-11-19T02:35:24","modified_gmt":"2010-11-19T06:35:24","slug":"in-memory-of-lucky","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hamiltonartist.com\/blog\/?p=321","title":{"rendered":"IN MEMORY OF ‘LUCKY’"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Lucky<\/p><\/div>\n

Lennie and I buried Lucky this morning.\u00a0 Lucky was a little black, Lionhead fish that I had once rescued.\u00a0 Several months ago he was stuck between two rocks that he had swam between and become wedged.\u00a0 When I saw him there I moved one of the rocks and he floated to the surface and then began to swim.\u00a0 Although both his sides were scraped to a pale gray from trying to free himself, he was otherwise fine.\u00a0 When I put my hand into the water to touch him he swam right into my hand as if he knew that I had saved him.\u00a0 He continued to swim into my hand whenever I would put it into the water.\u00a0 That is how Lennie came to name him “Lucky”.\u00a0 Lucky was just a sweet little being.\u00a0 He had no dorsal fin so maneuvered very slowly through the pond with the comets, orandas and two very docile little sharks.\u00a0 He looked like Moby Dick in the pond, dwarfing the others.\u00a0 When we returned I sought him out right away and sure enough he swam into my hand once again.\u00a0 Lucky was still the same size, but the other fish had tripled their size.\u00a0 He obviously was not getting enough of the food.\u00a0 Then three days ago, during the heavy and constant rains that we have been getting here, Lennie let a couple of guys use the garage to saw some wood.\u00a0 When I realized what the noise was I went running out to find the pond uncovered with sawdust blowing into the water.\u00a0 To the fish the sawdust just looked like fish flakes floating on top.\u00a0 They were eating it.\u00a0 I tried to swish it towards the filter and make the guys put up a tarp and then covered the pond with a sheet.\u00a0 When we returned home two of the orandas were missing.\u00a0 The workmen claimed they knew nothing.\u00a0 The next day Lucky wasn’t swimming or eating as much.\u00a0 By nightfall he was dead.\u00a0 Pets and people come and go in and out of our lives.\u00a0 Some leave a special mark on our hearts.\u00a0 I will never forget Lucky.<\/p>\n

We would normally think of sawdust as just wood.\u00a0 Just as we would think of an applesauce as just an apple.\u00a0 Sawdust is composed of wood that has been treated with preservatives to stop insects from infesting it.\u00a0 The most common chemical used to treat lumber used to be chromated copper arsenate<\/strong>, or CCA.\u00a0 In 2003, however, the Environmental Protection Agency restricted the use of CCA in residential settings due to health and environmental concerns about arsenic leaching out of the wood.\u00a0\u00a0 This is why the wood comes with warnings to wear gloves and masks when cutting.\u00a0 And what about the apples?\u00a0 Have you noticed how shiny most of the apples are in the supermarket?\u00a0 They feel almost like there is a plastic coating on them.\u00a0 Well there is!\u00a0 Apples use to be coated with beeswax to make them shiny and appealing.\u00a0 Beeswax became too expensive, so a replacement was found in the form of a type of acrylamide- a form of plastic that adheres to the skin of the apple.\u00a0 This cannot be washed off.\u00a0 Aim for organic apples instead that have no coating on them.\u00a0 They are dull, not shiny.\u00a0 Diet has played a huge part in Lennie’s recovery from Stage IV cancer.\u00a0 We buy as much organic as we can, which we find in Hawai’i at the health food stores and abundance of local markets.<\/p>\n

So in that small amount of sawdust was the poison that killed my little fish.\u00a0 It swirled around in the wind, being breathed in by the rest of us.\u00a0 We teeter on a very precarious balance with the amount of chemicals that we ingest.\u00a0 We do harm to our bodies every day and the majority of us will never learn and will even ignore common sense such as ‘why are the apples so shiny?’\u00a0 And then there’s the cucumbers….<\/p>\n

Goodbye Lucky, my little fish friend.\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Kathryn<\/em><\/p>\n

www.kathrynsmith.ca<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lennie and I buried Lucky this morning.\u00a0 Lucky was a little black, Lionhead fish that I had once rescued.\u00a0 Several months ago he was stuck between two rocks that he had swam between and become wedged.\u00a0 When I saw him there I moved one of the rocks and he floated to the surface and then […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[14,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-321","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-lennie-and-kathryn","category-thoughts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hamiltonartist.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/321","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hamiltonartist.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hamiltonartist.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hamiltonartist.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hamiltonartist.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=321"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.hamiltonartist.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/321\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":338,"href":"https:\/\/www.hamiltonartist.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/321\/revisions\/338"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hamiltonartist.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=321"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hamiltonartist.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=321"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hamiltonartist.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=321"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}